The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not necessarily constitute prior art.
The amount of UHD (Ultra High Definition) content is on the rise in recent years. Moreover, with the increasing resolution of video image content, various attempts have been made to allow viewing of favorite video images such as 360-degree UHD panoramic content in partial enlarged view or in its entirety by utilizing a variety of wearable devices.
The expansion of these UHD content services is leading the constantly increasing resolution of display devices including UHD-capable TVs, yet mobile terminals have been released mostly to support a resolution of QHD (Quad High Definition). Although mobile terminals are capable of supporting the UHD content, content of a full HD or higher resolution as viewed in the mobile terminals exhibits no discernible difference in image quality. In addition, the mobile terminal has a limited screen size and suffers from constraints when reproducing a high-resolution video, such as buffer size limit of the terminal and video quality degradation due to down-sampling.
Content of certain resolutions, in general, is provided to the mobile terminal with the bit rate or the resolution reduced through a real-time transcoder. However, the higher the original video resolution, the harder the content provision by the bit rate reduction alone, which requires a video editing for resolution adjustment before transmitting the content.
Unable to reproduce the content with increasing resolution in its entirety, the existing/legacy terminals (TV, smartphone, computer pad/tablet, monitor, etc.) also need to be provided with the source content pre-edited through the transcoder.
Such requirement exacts a transcoding procedure for decoding and editing the video images provided and then re-encoding the edited images. The transcoding procedure causes deterioration in video quality and data transfer delay among other deficiencies to restrict the provision of content and to increase cost associated with reprocessing of the video.
Further, when a headend performs the video reprocessing, the user's option for playing certain video segment is so limited as the resolution is increased. This is detrimental to the intrinsic feature of the UHD quality video that is to allow viewing of a select video segment.